Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Wong Kar-wai | 旺角卡門 (Wàngjiǎo Kǎmén) (As Tears Go By)

The first film
of Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai, As
Tears Go By is a gritty gangster movie that reveals what will later be the
director’s signature style: images of multicolored romanticism revolving around
characters are trapped by their own failures to be able to play out the love
they desire.

In this film the lovers are a handsome
young mob enforcer, Wah (Andy Lau), who is well-liked by the godfather and
other toughs who for him. However, Wah’s younger brother, Fly (Jacky Cheung),
as some of the other mobsters claim, is “out of control,” and Wah is forced to
spend most of his time getting his younger brother out of hot water, often after
brutal beatings from Tony (Alex Man) and his gang members.

Further complicating his life is Wah’s
lover, Mabel, who reveals early in the film that she has just aborted his baby,
having not heard from him for several weeks. Even more intrusive is Ngor
(Maggie Cheung), his cousin, who visits the city to see a doctor, believing
that has a serious disease. Camping out on his living room couch, she quickly
perceives how troubled Wah’s life is, finding further evidence of the chaos of
his life in his kitchen, filled with broken glasses and unwashed dishes.

Quietly, Ngor insinuates herself into
Wah’s world, cooking for him, cleaning up, and even buying him a new set of
glassware. Discovering that she is not ill after all, she departs, leaving a
note behind to tell him about the new glasses, suggesting that she knows all of
them will soon be destroyed, but that she has hidden one away for later use;
she also invites him to visit her someday.

Haunted by her quiet beauty, Wah follows
her back to her hometown, Lantau. She tells him that she is engaged to her
local doctor, and he begins the boat trip home before receiving a message that he
should meet her by the quay. A love affair soon follows, but time and again the
pacific life they live together is interrupted by Fly’s disruptive actions back
in Hong Kong.

Although Wah has tried to find Fly a
normal job selling fish from a local cart, Fly hates his job, and returns to
Tony’s club, destroying the mobster’s car, and threatening him with a gun. This
time even the godfather will not intrude, and both Fly and Wah are severely
beaten by Tony and his gang.

Wah attempts to return to Ngor, but once
again he hears of even more serious difficulties: Fly has offered Tony to
assassinate a heavily guarded informer, if Tony agrees to release him from his
debt. The situation is clearly a suicide mission.

By the time Wah reaches him, Fly has
already shot the informer and several of his guards, but he himself has also
been killed. With true sacrifice, Wah finishes up the killing and is himself
shot to death.

So the movie ends. But the description
above gives little of the true aesthetic substance of this early work. Already
Wong is far more interested in highly-elegant stills, lenses which transform
the city into flashes of candy-colored lights, and the inner, unstated
fascination with death that so characterize his later films. Fly is like a
lit-up piece of dynamite within a society already determined on destruction,
and Wah, as much as his desires push him out of that world, he cannot break the
familial ties, both real and symbolic.

In some respects, even in 1988, Wong’s
characters’ actions parallel the events upcoming 1990 transfer of the highly
westernized city to China. The love the former Colony might have for all things
western ultimately will clearly have to sacrificed to the new order. Love, in
short, is thwarted in this city, long of the cusp of transition from a culture
of openness to the dictatorship that the city faces, and which Wong’s
characters so obviously reflect.

Wong is not always sure of his focus in As Tears Go By, sometimes prettifying
the ugliest of human behavior, and at other moments sentimentalizing and even
fantasizing Wah’s and Ngor’s love (it’s unexplained, for example, how Wah,
already on the boat to Hong Kong could suddenly get back to the quay in time to
greet the waiting Ngor), and, even more seriously, creating plot strings that
go nowhere (why was Ngor so convinced of her nonexistent illness, and why?); we
can, nonetheless, see that the director’s instincts are spot-on. Besides, if
Ngor’s illness is a product of her hometown doctor’s imagination, by the end of
the film she has a deeper sickness to face for the rest of her life.